Lawyers across several Canadian provinces have filed proposed class action lawsuits, which allege that Google has been unlawfully collecting and selling off the personal information of Canadians without consent.
The complaints allege that via Google Services, Google Ads and Google Analytics, the tech giant “turns Canadians’ electronics into tracking devices, which it uses to build profiles on almost every internet user in Canada,” said Luciana Brasil, partner at Branch MacMaster, in a press release announcing the lawsuits.
The lawsuits, which name both Google and its parent company Alphabet as defendants, additionally allege that even people Google has no relationship with are affected by the company’s information gathering.
“There is no reason Canadians should tolerate what we say is extensive surveillance of their daily online activities, especially because Canada has laws specifically intended to protect them from such actions,” Brasil added in a statement.
The lawyers also accused Google of violating consumer protection and competition laws, by misrepresenting its own privacy and data practices to users. The lawsuits were filed in British Columbia, Ontario, and Quebec.
In an interview with IT World Canada, Brasil explained that even if a user has no relationship with Google – a user that does not use the Chrome browser or Gmail, for instance – information on their device can still be collected by a website that uses Google Analytics or Google Ads.
“So, my computer is being told to do something by somebody with whom I have had no relationship, without my knowledge and without any opportunity to give consent. That to me is such a clear case. That flies in the face of the argument that there is always consent and people always know what is being provided,” she said, adding that most people do not even know this type of privacy breach is happening in the background.
“So why is that I should provide that information? It’s not my job to help Google … They say it helps serve you better. It’s not to serve me better. It’s to find out what I do and to try to figure out what I want to buy and make suggestions to me,” Brasil stated. “It’s to try and extract a monetary value from (my) information.”
